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Recently, in a post titled "Ecologists: Time to End Invasive-Species Persecution", Brandon Keim discussed a comment published in Nature which argued that the ecological community unfairly vilifies the various plants and animals we've transported around the globe. In some sense, the authors are right, at least as far as saying that not all alien species should be considered bad or needing removal.

Straight from the beginning, though, the authors attack a dichotomy that doesn't exist. They writ........ Read more »

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If you didn't already know because, by chance, you missed my tweets, posts, and facebook updates, there is a science blogging contest going on RIGHT NOW. The 3 Quarks Daily Science Blogging Prize is currently narrowing down the top 20 posts from 87 nominees. To get through the gauntlet, a post has to get enough votes. Rather than remind you again to vote for Observations of a Nerd, I figured I'd show you why you should. Over the next 24 hours, I'll be reposting the three posts in the competition........ Read more »

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Lionfish are one of my favorite animals (I study them, after all). They're stunningly beautiful. Of course, they're also a devastating invasive species. Though they've only been in the Atlantic Ocean for some 15 years or so, they've taken over reefs, eating everything in their path. They've been found to reduce the recruitment of native fish by 79% on average, and are occurring in densities 8 times higher than in their native range. To say they're bad is an understatement. The damage is so sever........ Read more »

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I have to confess, when I saw a global map of average penis size flying around twitter, I was like a eighth grade boy finding his first nudie magazine - I couldn't help but take a peek. After a brief heart attack (it's in cm, not inches), my inner scientist started asking silly questions. You know, the kind of things that would only occur to a scientist when looking at a map of penis size like, "is this just a stochastic distribution?" "is there any reason why this pattern would occur?" and of c........ Read more »

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Peta recently stirred up quite a lot of controversy with their banned superbowl ad claiming that "studies have shown that vegetarians are better lovers." Of course, no such research exists, but somehow in trying find where that came from (no pun intended) I ended up in a twitter conversation about diet and sex. Anyhow, to make a long story short, after several converstaional tangents I found myself sifting through the scientific literature for anything containing "taste" and "semen."*

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Sexual assault is no laughing matter - unless, of course, the would-be rapist isn't human. Who doesn't giggle when they see a small dog humping someone's leg? But what many people don't realize is that reverse bestiality - where an animal makes unwanted sexual advances on a person - is a true problem for scientists working in the field where the actions of wild animals are completely unpredictable.... Read more »

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Citrus fruits are delicious. Their delicate balance of sweetness and tartness is a biochemical masterpiece. It's no wonder that they, of all nature's tasty options, are the highest value fruit crop in terms of international trade, with over 105 million tons produced annually. But these tempting produce face a persistant villain that seeks to destroy their roots; a menace known, cleverly, as the citrus root weevil.

The weevil's grubby larvae feed like maggots on the vital roots of citrus plants........ Read more »

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Photo by Sara LeeAnn Banevedes
I don't think Brian Alexander is a bad guy or a misogynist. He writes the Sexploration column for MSNBC, so sure, his job is all about selling sex stories to the public. He even wrote a book about American sexuality. But I don't personally think he has a burning hatred for women, or views them as objects placed on this Earth for the sexual satisfaction of men. However, I very easily could, given how he chose to report on a recent study published in Science about m........ Read more »

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Most animals reproduce sexually. This means that every individual has to find another individual to mate with - and they have to convince that other that they're worthy of the privilege. More often than not when it comes to picking that special someone, it's the girls that get to be choosy. Females spend a lot more energy per offspring than males from the get-go due to the size of our eggs (let alone most child rearing responsibilities), so as a gender, females want to make sure they don't waste........ Read more »

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I couldn't help but be intrigued that my stiffest competition for winning the $10,000 Blogging Scholarship is a makeup blogger. What is it about cosmetics that is so appealing? Why do people wear makeup, and what might have caused early man to play around with blush and lipstick? Well, like everything else in life, a lot can be explained by science. Meanwhile, after you read this post, I encourage you to go vote for me whomever you think is the best blogger in the competition (PS I'm Christie Wi........ Read more »

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One of the toughest concepts to grasp about evolution is its lack of direction. Take the classic image of the evolution of man, from knuckle-walking ape to strong, smart hunter:

We view this as the natural progression of life. Truth is, there was no guarantee that some big brained apes in Africa would end up like we are now. It wasn't inevitable that we grew taller, less hairy, and smarter than our relatives. And it certainly wasn't guaranteed that single celled bacteria-like critters ended up ........ Read more »

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Every year, the crew behind the Annals of Improbable Research honor research that "first makes people laugh, then makes them think." These awards, known as the Ig Nobels, honor some of the most entertaining research published in the past year. The competition is fierce, and the prizes highly coveted. But without further ado! This year, the winners are... Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...... Read more »

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Recently, I got this e-mail forwarded to me. It started out with the header
World shame coast in COSTA RICA
Followed by images like these:
and it concluded with the message:
Please distribute widely.
The Turtle eggs are stolen to be sold.
The planet is thankful for the forwarding of this email.

The e-mail isn't an isolated incident. A quick internet search will immediately bring up sites like this one, heralding the extinction of sea turtles in Costa Rica due to the illegal harvest of thei........ Read more »

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Scientists worry way too much about the impacts of our work. We want our papers to mean something, for people to really want to read them. Of course, the true test of whether your paper is important is that future papers cite you as a reference.

What makes one paper cited by everyone and another fall into obscurity? Well, there are all kinds of theories. Maybe it's how high-impact the journal is - after all, a Science paper is better than obscure journal, right? Some have even suggested it's a........ Read more »

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So, Shark Diver set out a challenge for Ocean of Pseudoscience Week that I simply had to look into. He wanted to know whether there's any science backing the notion that Bull Sharks, Carcharhinus leucas, have extraordinarily high testosterone levels and might thus be usable as a source for legally obtainable steroids - an idea, apparently, started by some video game.

The rumor, as I'd heard it, is that the fierce attitudes of these large and aggressive sharks is due to unfathomably high circul........ Read more »

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The sea is a dark and often mysterious place, and it's no wonder that the fear and fascination with the marine world has led to more than a few inaccurate claims. The crew over at Southern Fried Science have decided that this week is all about busting pseudoscience and the myths that surround our ocean realm. As it turns out, I'd posted about one of these before. So here, in honor of Ocean of Pseudoscience week, is a repost busting the myth that sharks don't get cancer.

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Yes, it would be great if we never spilled a drop of oil. No matter how hard we may try, though, the fact is that nobody is perfect, and oil spills are an inevitable consequence of our widespread use of oil. The question is, once the oil is out there, how do we clean it up? Perhaps my grandfather put it best, when I asked him what he thought about how BP and the US is responding to the spill.

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This week, Science published two papers about the genetics of Neandertals from a team of scientists based at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology. The first (which is the only one anyone seems to really care about) gives a draft version of the entire Neandertal genome - a whopping 4 billion base pairs of DNA. They use this information to look for genomic regions that may have been affected by positive selection in ancestral modern humans that led to their separation from Neander........ Read more »

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Once a year, Christmas Island experiences a red tide completely unlike any other in the world. The roads are blockaded as a swarm of Christmas Island Red Crabs (Gecarcoidea natalis), one hundred million strong, makes its way from the forests to the sea. This massive migration is fueled by the strongest urge an animal has: to reproduce. They must travel from their forest homes to the sea to spawn. The drive is so strong that the crabs will crawl their way onto, into and over whatever they must to........ Read more »

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We saw that the littlest differences can lead to dramatic variations when we looked at the wide variety in dogs. But despite their differences, all breeds of dogs are still the same species as each other and their ancestor. How do species split? What causes speciation? And what evidence do we have that speciation has ever occurred?

Critics of evolution often fall back on the maxim that no one has ever seen one species split into two. While that's clearly a straw man, because most speciation tak........ Read more »

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